Red Hat Embraces Big Data, Contributes Hadoop Plug-In

Red Hat Inc. on Wednesday announced the contribution of its Hadoop plug-in to the Apache open source community.

Best known for its enterprise Linux distributions, Red Hat announced the open sourcing of its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in as part of a broader announcement of a shift in direction toward embracing Big Data with an "open hybrid cloud" application platform and infrastructure.

As explained by company executive Ranga Rangachari in a Webcast, the open hybrid cloud is designed to give companies the ability to create Big Data workloads on a public cloud and move them back and forth between their own private clouds, "without having to reprogram those applications." Red Hat said in a news release that many companies use public clouds such as Amazon Web Services for developing software, proving concepts and pre-production phases of projects that use Big Data. "Workloads are then moved to their private clouds to scale up the analytics with the larger data set," the company said.

Red Hat said it is hoping that the software development aspect utlizes the Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in soon to be under the control of the Apache Hadoop community. Red Hat Storage, running on Linux, is based on the GlusterFS distributed file system. It's provided as an alternative to the Hadoop Distributed File System, known for some technical limitations that Apache and other organizations have also addressed.

Rangachari said the path to the open hyrbrid cloud Big Data application platform will eventually incorporate an Apache Hive connector (now in preview), NoSQL/MongoDB Java interoperability and RESTful OData Web protocol access, in addition to its existing JBoss middleware.

He emphasized that the new cloud strategy will be woven throughout every Red Hat project, noting that "Big Data could be one of the killer apps for the open hybrid cloud."

When asked why Red Hat was contributing its Hadoop plug-in to Apache, Rangachari said the Apache Hadoop community was the "center of gravity" in the Hadoop world and that the move will provide developers with easier access to the plug-in from the same ecosystem. He also said the company expects that, rather than stopping innovation of the technology, the move to open source will actually contribute to more innovation.